“What Makes A Great Headline?”
Well, rather than me inventing this from scratch – let’s just summarize what the masters of advertising above have to say are the crucial components of a winning headline:
*Flag down readers who are your targets
*Promise the reader believable benefit
*Include one or more items of self-interest, news, curiosity or examples of the ‘quick and easy way’
So – pinpoint the right people, hit them with a benefit and evoke their curiosity and belief that it is in their own personal interest to find out more.
“Building A Barrage Of Brilliant Benefits”
The biggest lesson I have personally learned about copywriting is that the BENEFIT is the single most important aspect of a headline.
You can get everything else right but if you screw up or leave out the benefit the headline just won’t work.
Let’s pretend we’re a business that sells deluxe office chairs that have a built-in massager and heater. The name of the product is Delux-o-Seat. We’re going to go through the actual process of headline building for this product right now.
I suggest that as we go through this you follow the steps for the example product and also repeat them for your own product or service.
As I have said – the benefit to the customer is the most important aspect of the headline (and indeed your entire sales copy) so you need to start from there. At first let’s just forget the headline and concentrate on brainstorming the benefits of the product and writing down anything that comes into your head no matter how silly or minor the benefits may sound.
The trick here is to start off just listing the FEATURES of the product and then converting these into BENEFITS for the customer.
Okay – so now, if you’ve been mirroring this exercise for your own product, you will have a list of features of your product with an equivalent customer-benefit for each one.
Thought it might interest you.
See you there…
Warmly,
Rob 
robsdiary
Tags: Headlines and ad copy